


Mr. Pennyworth's Orchard

by Souja



Series: Life's more fun when you're dead [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, i was in a stream not long ago and I remembered I wrote this so here, its...just trying out an idea really, plot doesnt exist, take my fiction and run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 04:04:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11866299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Souja/pseuds/Souja
Summary: Thomas and Martha take a stroll through an orchard.





	Mr. Pennyworth's Orchard

.Mr. Pennyworth's Orchard.

_\--_

_The premise was something like ‘dead men don’t tell tales but Wayne ghosts don’t stay dead’  but honestly I just wanted to write Thomas and Martha dicking around_

_\--_

 

They stood not like soldiers, in a row awaiting orders, but spread apart and wreathed by decorative stones and tended to by careful hands. It seemed at first that they were idle, resting. Like the statues that were dispersed among them in varied states of undress and the grass that flittered in the chill wind. But Martha knew better and Thomas thought they were lovely.

In truth they were busy-- their roots gathering nutrients, their leaves respiring, their branches bearing fruit. Growing. It was apparent that Alfred had a knack for landscaping.

"Alfred has a knack for everything," Thomas would retort, stealing an apple from the tree. His teeth would sink straight through when he bit, tasting air and dust rather than the coveted juices. Martha would stifle a laugh at the betrayal etched on his face.

After goshhowmany years being dead the act still shocked him. The taste of apple eluded him once again. The dead man frowned. His wife laughed and when he looked at her, she composed herself and pretended to be busy triapsing the garden path.

Grass tickled underfoot, audacious things, but the unperturbed and unrelenting Martha soldiered on till she was past the low hedge border. Meanwhile, Thomas sorted himself out, laughing softly as he placed the apple on the ground. A battle for another day, perhaps. He wouldn't give up  _that_ easy.

It was then that he joined his wife as she tred on the cobblestone path. There'd be no consequences for straying--whether of the annoyed British or irritating thorn in the heel variety-- but, well, old habits died hard. Much harder than millionaires, anyway. They joined arms, taking Hollywood steps in the cool afternoon.

For all its misery it was a beautiful place indeed. Pristinely maintained with every season. Did the children know what they meant? Did the children even know of its existence? Questions asked, answers never found. 

Once they toyed with the idea of a reverse seance. It was during a particularly awful decade, when the orchard grew from a single aged tree near the back, to include another and the yellow ribbon that noosed around it. When visits to the garden seemed like penance and the manor eked with a disastrous brand of sorrow. But their leads had turned up--well, alive, oddly enough. And that sort of things was called  _haunting_ and terribly frowned upon in the ghostly community. 

So they watched from the shadows, and they cried from the shadows, and they cursed in broad daylight because  _no one would see them anyway._

_But, moving on._

In absence of back pain and responsibilities, they spent their nights on idle chatter. People or events, they debated, people or events.

"People!" Martha insisted again. Because so much had happened in Gotham's streets it would take more than a small orchard to catalogue it. Thomas, however, liked to think that there was a shrub for every time the world was ending.

“If he wanted symbolism,” Thomas insisted, usually on nights where they sat on weathered buildings, watching Bruce and his young exchange blows with hired criminals, “He’d go for Aspens. They do that--that cloning thing? Where their roots become new trees. It’s perfect, Martha, and you’re wrong.”

“But these ones flower, they bear fruit!” Martha would retort, wincing at the aftermath of a head versus wall collision. The head usually lost, she suspected.

Thomas would grimace horribly as the numbers began to dwindle and the men became more desperate. Desperate people made rash decisions, stupid decisions. Sometimes it was rushing blindly into the fray, others it was unsheathing the illegally gained machine guns. The machine gun nights were hardest to sit through, their echoes unrelenting and that much harder to talk over. “Which is why it’s perfect for Gotham. The city persists.”

“That is an awful argument, Tommy,” laughed out beneath a wrinkled nose on the rare days when words would come, "And I hate that you're right." 

Her husband would beam.

The situation would diffuse and they'd leave amidst the police sirens and flashing lights. If they lingered longer, tabloids would print stories about the ghosts of Thomas and Martha Wayne moonlighting as arms dealers underneath full page spreads about Batman and Robin. The Gazette was good about it, but the Glib would have a field day.

They resolved that each tree was a person, then. A body above ground, because their family didn't understand the meaning of the phrase ‘dead is dead’. It was the bitter pride of many a ghost met while skirting Gotham's decaying streets. In forgotten corners they whispered tales of the unkillable Wayne generation. Endearing, until the tones became harsh and the ruminations a bit too vile. There were many corners that they now avoided.

But the wind blew testily as if demanding attention, somehow still mussing Martha’s hair. Then, the gigolo, it went off to flirt with the shy leaves of the trees. It brought with it a tune, a soft hum with forgotten words. Alfred was in the garden.

“Thomas,” Martha hissed, face alight. She made tiny gestures towards their companion.

Around Alfred was a beige apron, his hands donned with matching gloves. There was a large straw hat on his head, almost cartoonishly so. A red bucket held tools that clinked with his every step. He crouched before a big apple tree, setting out his tools with impressive order.

Martha took the spot next to him, watching curiously as he inspected his tools. She bent at her knees so they were at equal level. Had she been alive her dress would have been wrecked. Simple blessings then. Thomas took his time strolling to join them.

“You know, dear,” drawled as she rose from her spot, batting at dust that couldn’t have landed on her, “Alfred and I used to have tea.” She pointed in the direction of the manor, her hand trailing through the significantly aged other, dissipating slightly into tendrils. Thomas winced and Martha cringed.

She shook it off with a strained smile, straightening her shoulders and continuing, “In the manor, when Bruce was young and you were busy.”

“I was always busy,” he countered dryly.

Martha smiled, “we had a lot of tea.”

“Too much tea is bad for you.”

“Since when? What’re your sources?”

“Since right now. It’s a Wayne Fact.”

Martha nodded, “So it’s a lie?”

Thomas looked heavenward and there might have been shame under the mischievous quirk of his lips. “Wouldn’t say that,” he hummed, staring up at the boughs of dark leaves, “it’s something a very smart dead person once said.”

Martha laughed, unconvinced and wonderful, “Well, that’s the best kind of source, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Thomas said, twisting a wise half-step away.  

Meanwhile, Alfred shifted his crouch and began pulling at dandelions that had wandered into his territory, settling them into the emptied bucket. The Wayne couple regarded him quietly, taking slow steps around the woody trunk of the apple tree.

“Meticulous as always,” Thomas whistled, fascinated as Alfred produced some instrument and dug it in, pulling to remove the root and a clump of dirt with it.

A raised eyebrow from Martha, “It’s Alfred. What did you expect?”

Guile hazed his eyes, but he remained mum. The open air echoed the tune that Alfred whistled, and for a moment it was perfect. 

(The next night would bring an impossibility of shrapnel loaded into already scarred--just barely healing--skin. Alfred’s lips would be pinched with worry, with concentration, and the tune would be lost to the recently filtered cave air. Bruce would shield himself in kevlar and bundle his fears with good intentions. His family would ask to help, be turned away, then do it anyway, because they stayed not like soldiers, awaiting orders, but like a mottled unit already in motion.

They'd come home with bumps and scrapes, grinning like ducklings, while Alfred hid his whitened knuckles beneath a tray of tea and sandwiches. Martha would seethe, " _of all the traits to have adopted, why the stubbornness?"_   while Thomas observed Alfred's stitches with silent envy and masked his relief with medical terminology. 

Then, after purposefully-harsh rebuke had been given with an extra helping of affection, they’d watch from the shadows. They'd await the next day when bedrest was mandatory and wounds were soothed with sweet apple pies and bitter wit and ponder monuments built to living ghosts.)

.

**Author's Note:**

> there are like five "surprise,we're dead" references in this try and find them


End file.
